Thorn in my side, p.1
Thorn In My Side, page 1
Praise for Sweetpea series:
‘Think Bridget Jones meets Killing Eve – only with better jokes. This darkly comic novel has the potential to become a cult classic’
Daily Mail
‘Makes Hannibal Lecter look like Mary Poppins. Dark, depraved and devilishly delicious’
John Marrs
‘Not for the squeamish or the faint-hearted. Think Bridget Jones meets American Psycho’
RED
‘Brilliantly-written characters, original and engaging. It’s so good!’
BA Paris
‘Filthy and funny . . . a compulsive read’
Sunday Times
‘You MUST read this book especially if you like your anti heroes dirty-mouthed and deadly dark. I adored it’
Fiona Cummins
‘Pitch dark, laugh-out-loud hilarious – the Sweetpea series is pure genius escapism’
Susi Holliday
CJ SKUSE was born in 1980 in Weston-super-Mare. She has two First Class degrees in Creative Writing and Writing for Young People, and aside from being a novelist works as a Senior Lecturer at Bath Spa University.
Also by CJ Skuse
The Alibi Girl
Sweetpea series:
Sweetpea
In Bloom
Dead Head
Thorn In My Side
For Young Adults:
Pretty Bad Things
Rockholic
Dead Romantic
Monster
The Deviants
Copyright
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This edition 2024
1
First published in Great Britain by
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Copyright © CJ Skuse 2023
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CJ Skuse asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008608347
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2023 ISBN: 9780008608354
Version 2023-11-17
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008608347
For the female geniuses I grew up watching on TV who moulded my funny bone – Caroline Aherne, Dawn French, Pauline Quirke, Jennifer Saunders and Victoria Wood.
He who dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose.
ANNE BRONTË
Contents
Cover
Praise
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
Epigraph
January 2020
Friday, 24 January, 11.30 p.m. – John F. Kennedy International Airport, Queens, New York City
September 2021
Daily Mirror: Garden of Evil
Sunday, 5 September 2021
Monday, 6 September 2021
Tuesday, 7 September 2021
Wednesday, 8 September 2021
Saturday, 11 September 2021
Sunday, 12 September 2021
Monday, 13 September 2021
Wednesday, 15 September 2021
Saturday, 18 September 2021
Sunday, 19 September 2021
Monday, 20 September 2021
Tuesday, 21 September 2021
Wednesday, 22 September 2021
Thursday, 23 September 2021
Friday, 24 September 2021
Saturday, 25 September 2021 – my unofficial birthday
Sunday, 26 September 2021
Monday, 27 September 2021
Wednesday, 29 September 2021 – our wedding day
Thursday, 30 September 2021 – early morning
Monday, 4 October 2021
Friday, 8 October 2021 – honeymoon
Sunday, 10 October 2021
Monday, 11 October 2021
Tuesday, 12 October 2021
Wednesday, 13 October 2021 – early hours
Friday, 15 October 2021
Saturday, 16 October 2021
Sunday, 17 October 2021
Acknowledgments
About the Publisher
January 2020
Friday, 24 January, 11.30 p.m. – John F. Kennedy International Airport, Queens, New York City
People who hog airport seats for hours and when they finally vacate, you have to sit in the ghost of their arse warmth
People who crowd the baggage carousel
People who aren’t ready when they’re next in the security line. GET YOUR FUCKING SKECHERS OFF, KAREN.
Everyone involved with the movie version of Cats – also, Idris Elba as Macavity is off-the-charts hot in this but he’s a cat. How am I meant to feel?! Like I want to shag a cat? I don’t get it.
Mitch Silverton – the convicted sex offender currently living under the same roof as my daughter
Don’t look. Just don’t look.
I march down endless walkways thronging with families studying leaflets for the Statue of Liberty and Empire State. I’m not looking at them. I’m not looking at their kids. I’m not looking at the other departure boards either because I am not going to London. I’m going to Gate C61 to get my connecting flight – Delta 762 to San Diego.
But there are so many children about. So many tiny reminders. Small, wriggling guilt trips everywhere I look. My throat constricts with every laugh; my stomach churns with every shriek or scream. Every single one of them sends my thoughts straight back to Ivy in my mind. Straight back to England, where I should be headed now. I should go to her. She needs me.
A ginger kid dances across my path, toy monkey wrapped around her waist. A small boy kicks his legs in his pushchair – he wants his cake now. A girl rides a blue Trunki; another sits on a luggage cart, pretending she’s on a gondola. One noms on a colossal tit. In slings, on shoulders, running in shops, along travellators, walking a toy bunny along the back of her dad’s seat.
Get out of my way. Get away from me.
I pass gate after gate seeing ‘London – Boarding Soon’ on the screen. ‘London – Now Boarding’. London. London. London.
The place where Ivy is. My baby who needs me. My baby who is in danger.
I don’t stop for the sandwich I’ve promised my grumbling stomach since Seren’s house – instead I keep walking. Only six more hours and I’ll be home, in my fiancé’s arms. Raf will talk me back to sense. I just have to turn off my brain until I get to him. I doom-scroll the latest apocalypse trend, see what Flag Twitter’s losing its shit about today. Someone’s chopping coleslaw. Someone else is cancelling some singer for a tweet they sent eleven years ago. Someone’s collapsed in the street in China and there’s a video of it doing the rounds.
Ivy needs you. Your baby needs you.
No, she doesn’t. Claudia won’t let anything happen to Ivy. And Seren promised to keep a close eye on things. I’m allowed to call her once a month for updates. It’ll be OK. Ivy doesn’t need me, she’s better off without me, that’s what I try to tell myself. There’s always another voice in my head though – the one that never leaves.
She needs her real mum. Ivy’s living with a convicted sex offender.
I go into a shop and scan the mags. All the celebs are having babies. Smiling kids. Crying kids. Little shoes, little socks. Little girls.
Claudia married a sex offender. My baby lives with a sex offender.
I make a sharp U-turn and scan the books. It’s all autobiographies of gammony politicians and self-help books by middle-aged women who think you can be cured of anything by shoving a crystal up your backside.
The girl was thirteen. Mitch isn’t a threat to Ivy. Seren said she would keep an eye on them.
Seren lives thousands of miles away from them. She can’t do anything. Remember, she’s lied to you before, hasn’t she?
I arrive at the gate and present my boarding pass, trying to drown my inner thoughts with the conversations of others in the queue and the smell of freshly cooked churros at the Cinnabon concession.
You can save Ivy. You must kill Mitch. It’s the onl y way to be sure.
Pretty sure I’m just quoting lines from Aliens now.
A baby is crying in the queue behind me. Far away, but not far enough.
I shove my earphones in. Beyoncé, ‘Save the Hero’. It starts off soft and slow and pianoey. Not loud enough to mask the kid’s wailing.
I haven’t done my ten minutes of meditation today. I’ve been doing it since Mexico. Tenoch taught me how. I focus on my breaths – try to clear a space in all the mess. Hold for seven, out for four. Release them slowly. I am here. I am breathing. I am loved.
The universe loves you, Ophelia. The sun, the animals, your flowers, they love you. That’s what Tenoch had told me. He wanted me to be better. Both he and Beyoncé were telling me how great I was, how loved I was, how they want me to be strong because I’m a hero; a hero who saved the world.
But what do YOU want? You want to kill Mitch. That’s what you want.
I breathe away the time it takes for us to board the plane and take our seats. Once I’m ensconced by the window in Row 19, I feel somewhat at peace. Doing the right thing never feels right to me but that’s why I gave her up in the first place, let’s face it. To do the ‘right’ thing. Nobody needs a serial killer for a mother. Nobody needs me.
‘Good evening, everyone, this is your captain speaking,’ crackles the announcement. ‘Welcome to your Delta Flight 762 to San Diego . . .’
The cabin doors close. They move the staircase away. The engines start up. There’s no way back. There’s nothing more I can do.
I’m going home.
My chest and head ache with short, stabbing pains, which could be the stirrings of a menstrual migraine but are more likely to be all the uncried tears screaming to get out. It feels like a heavy stone is sitting on my lungs. I turn off my music and open my Duolingo app to continue my Spanish tuition – twenty minutes a day for the past year. But I can’t concentrate. Everything’s annoying. Everything’s fractious.
The kid next to me starts grizzling the second the plane begins its ascent. It would be a little girl – a tiny, chubby-legged toddling reminder of the girl I did not go to. Like the girl I have left at the mercy of a sex offender in England. Because I am a bad, bad mother. That’s why I left her in the first place. Why I dumped her. The pain tightens.
‘She’ll settle down in a second.’ The girl’s mother nervous-laughs, flapping about like a fart in a colander, not knowing which hole to go out of, begging the kid to be quiet, squeaking her elephant toy, flicking through a lift-the-flap book about shapes, but the child is restless and nothing settles her.
Very much like myself.
Damn woman. Why bring a kid on a plane at this time of night? I try to breathe in a lungful of decent air but there’s no such thing on an airplane – it’s all farts, feet and Fenty perfume. An air stewardess who’s all pinched and pouty, and as thin as my patience, minces along to check we’re belted up.
Just bring the fucking drinks trolley already, Beverley! I think but I don’t say it out loud; instead, I breathe the fart air and flick through the channels. It’s a roll call of every programme and film I loathe. Unfunny animals. Unfunny comedians. Non-disabled actors in wheelchairs careening through pigeons on their way to their next Oscar. And an episode of The Chase where the stupid bitch takes the minus offer and STILL loses. Ugh.
The same thought whirls around my head and won’t go away: I should have gone to Ivy. The airplane walls close in. Everything’s so small, confined, like I’m a tin can in a garbage crusher.
But soon, we are airborne. What’s done is done. And I have to live with being the worst mother in the universe.
Apart from the one next to me cos the kid is still screaming.
Once the seatbelt signs have gone off, the drinks trolley appears up ahead. I resolve to drink it dry. There’s a touch on my left arm and I snap my head round to see the toddler standing on the middle seat, all shining eyes and biscuit drool. Tiny pudge arms. She smiles at me. And I do what I don’t want to do, what every fibre in my body is telling me not to do: I melt.
‘She’s a good flier, apart from take-off,’ Useless Mom tells me.
I lean forward and take Richard E. Grunt out of my bag, my little Sylvanians pig in his blue dungarees which I sprayed with Raf’s cologne before I left home. I can’t smell it anymore – I’ve sniffed him dry. Me and the kid play peekaboo with Dicky for a bit. She reaches for him when he disappears.
‘Pig gone!’ she cries.
I magic Richard up from my sleeve and her eyes widen and she makes a grab for him again. And it’s the arrow straight to my heart. It’s not so scary after all, engaging with a kid.
The girl looks at me, expressionless, reaching. ‘Want pig! Want pig!’
No way, kid. This pig dies with me.
‘Do you have kids yourself?’ asks Useless Mom.
‘Yes,’ I say, as the snooty flight attendant with the severe Posh Spice haircut and hips like blades hands me my vodka and orange in my weak hand and my grip ain’t great so I almost drop it all over the kid. Thank God for old Righty. Anyway, I knock it back in one. I ask for another and Bev gives the up-and-down eyes to judge me but pours it out regardless.
‘I have a daughter. But she doesn’t live with me.’
‘I’m Kim,’ says Useless Mom.
‘Ophelia,’ I say, breaking out my bestest all-American gal accent that I use on strangers. I show Kim the picture of Ivy that Seren let me keep.
Kim smiles. ‘Oh, she’s beautiful. What’s her name?’
I don’t want to lie. ‘Ivy.’
‘She looks just like you. This is Imani. I’m Kim.’
‘She looks like her dad,’ I say, staring at the picture. ‘Curly caramel hair, a smile that could make the sun rise. That’s all him, not me.’
‘Would you watch her for me?’ says Kim. ‘I need the bathroom.’
‘Yeah, OK.’ She gets up and Imani gladly sits on my lap and plays with my phone, which is an old iPhone of Raf’s with some games on it that I never play; shooting games that I find too loud and Crash Bandicoot, which gives me motion sickness. Imani’s still asking for the pig every moment but I pop my earbuds in her ears so she can discover the delights of Queen Bey. I play ‘Run the World’ for her and she teaches me some fire baby moves.
‘Again! Again!’
We read the in-flight magazine and it’s all about Japan. There’s an article about kintsugi – the Japanese art of mending broken crockery with gold to highlight its brokenness and make it even more beautiful.
‘God the Japanese are bloody brilliant. Seriously. You can get like roast dinners from vending machines there and robot prostitutes. And they are actually growing melons with Hello Kitty already on them. They’re amazing.’ I order another voddy from Bitch Spice.
Imani smashes her way through the mag but she’s getting bored so I take a pen out of my bag and hand it to her so she can draw all over Tom Cruise’s pearly whites at some premiere.
‘Did I do the right thing?’ I ask her. ‘I know I did – that’s why I did it – but why does it feel so wrong? Maybe if I was on the London plane now, that would feel wrong. Everything’s . . . wrong. I can’t make myself feel better. And the vodka measures they give on this flight are a joke.’
As Imani’s bent over the magazine, I tell myself not to but I do it anyway: I smell her hair. Milk and peaches. I get lost in it.
The girl looks back up, having completely scribbled out Cruise from existence. ‘Want pig.’
‘No, he’s asleep.’ I sniff her head again. ‘What shampoo do you use?’
‘Poo,’ she replies.
I swear if I caught someone smelling my kid, I’d be wrapping their veins and arteries around me as an extra seatbelt, but I can’t help myself. There’s so much heaven on that one teeny head. I can’t help but cuddle her in. I imagine she’s Ivy. Within moments her head is heavy on my chest. I stroke her tiny eyebrows, aka kiddy catnip. Soon her eyes close altogether.
Kim returns from the toilet and goes to take her from me. I don’t want to give her back but it’s clear from the way she is extricating Imani that she is the one who gets the privilege of lollopy cuddles like this, not me.
I feel cold without Imani so I put Raf’s North Face on and inhale what’s left of his cologne in the collar, trying to get comfortable against the wall.
